I also wanted wanted to show that as far as earthly life is concerned, death is an absolute parting and a farewell. The old Mr and Mrs Kings, living in their cottage and growing their neat vegetable garden also show the strength of those people who can accept this… At the film’s climax, Stephen’s birth parents – whom his superego has conjured up – seek to wrest him from his newly chosen path as an adult embracing his impurity as a being of mixed race and mixed sex. A middle class pastor's son has dreams of angels and the pagan King Penda that force him to question many of his beliefs and opinions. Show full synopsis The most ambitious of Alan Clarke’s early projects, Penda’s Fen at first seems a strange choice for him. Most scripts that attracted Clarke, no matter how non-naturalistic, had a gritty, urban feel with springy vernacular dialogue (and sometimes almost no dialogue). David Rudkin’s screenplay is different: rooted in a mystical rural English landscape, it is studded with long, self-consciously poetic speeches and dense with sexual/mythical visions and dreams, theological debate and radical polemic—as well as an analysis of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. But though Penda’s Fen is stylistically the odd film out in Clarke’s work, it trumpets many of his favourite themes, in particular what it means to be English in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Original music is by Paddy Kingsland of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, who also electronically manipulated parts of the Britten recording.

Kids 1 9 7 9 (UK) 13 x 60 minute episodes Debuting on 27 April 1979, LWT's Kids provided 13 hour-long episodes… It was conceived as a film and written visually. Some people think visual questions are none of the writer’s business—that he should provide the action and leave it to the director to picture it all out. For me, writing for the screen is a business of deciding not only what is to be shown but how it is to be seen… P enda’s Fen was first broadcast on Thursday 21st of March for the BBC1 strand Play for Today. It was written by David Rudkin (1936-) who rose to prominence in the ’60s with his play, Afore Night Come (1962). Rudkin was inspired by the playwright Harold Pinter, When I think of The Ghost Stories for Christmas series, I think of Lawrence Gordon Clark more than MR James. But of all the James adaptations, this is my favourite – a highly atmospheric piece of visual storytelling with a chilling climax. I find the simplicity of the filmmaking invigorating. No doubt born of limitation, this is cinema by way of TV.Sukhdev, Sandhu (2016), "Penda's Fen", essay in Blu-ray booklet published by the British Film Institute, 23 May 2016. In the garden of an old manor house, he witnesses a ritual in which men, women and children have their hands chopped off with a cleaver and rejoice at the mutilation, and he even encounters King Penda (Geoffrey Staines) – the last Pagan king of Mercia who died in AD655 – on the slopes of the Malvern Hills. The film’s screenwriter David Rudkin was both an insider and an outsider. He was of Northern Irish descent and his parents were evangelical Christians. He’d also studied at Cambridge, performed National Service in the Royal Corps of Signals, and taught classics at secondary school. This proximity to and muscle memory of the architectonics of Englishness is palpable in every scene of Penda’s Fen where he deconstructs most of its pillars. Stephen, a rather priggish adolescent, is defined by his education (a traditional grammar school), his religion (his father is a Rector), his home (a gorgeous stretch of the West Country whose green fields of forevermore his bedroom overlooks), and his politics (he believes in the sanctity of the nuclear family, and that the country is imperiled by left-wingers). Very formal in its presentation of religion and politics, from the school system on up, but still manages to interject new (and far older) ideas in counterpoint to the period and setting. What at first came across as something that might be strict and stodgy turned into an engaging coming-of-age tale in the form an older teenager, on the verge of manhood, who is troubled by questions of spirituality and god, while at the same time coming to terms with his own sexuality, and how all of this affects his understanding of his place in society.

Written by David Rudkin and directed by Alan Clarke, Penda's Fen was first broadcast in 1974 as part of the BBC's Play for Today series. It tells the story of seventeen year-old Stephen, a middle-class pastor's son who has a bizarre series of encounters with angels, the composer Edward Elgar, and King Penda, the mythical last pagan ruler of England. These encounters - whether real or imagined - force Stephen to question his religious beliefs, his politics and his sexuality. The idea for Penda’s Fen came about after Rudkin’s wife described a diversion sign, that misspelt the name of the village. After some research, Rudkin discovered that the village had been spelt like that centuries ago. Not only was that spelling a mistake, but the one before that as well. This discovery was described by Rudkin as, ‘…the old, primeval ‘demon’ of the place opening half an eye…’ Stephen (Spencer Banks) sees the misspelling of the village Rudkin’s play wasn’t a one-off, his other work is equally powerful, engaging and fascinating. A later film for the BBC, the wildly ambitious Artemis 81, is three hours in length (!) and explores similar themes, albeit in a less coherent fashion. It also includes Daniel Day-Lewis’s first screen appearance and has Sting playing Hywel Bennett’s angelic object of homoerotic desire. Rudkin’s stage work is fiercely imaginative, using Joycean dialogue to striking effect, and I’m continually surprised that no one seems interested in re-staging remarkable plays such as The Sons of Light. As for Penda’s Fen, whenever a TV executive tries to argue that television hasn’t dumbed down I’d offer this work as Exhibit A for the prosecution. Rudkin and Clarke’s film was screened at 9.35 in the evening on the nation’s main TV channel, BBC 1, at a time when there were only three channels to choose from. A primetime audience of many millions watched this visceral and unapologetically intelligent drama; show me where this happens today. The wars that Penda waged against his Christianised neighbours were not religious wars—in fact, Penda himself did not try to prevent his son and daughter from becoming Christians as part of the dynastic marriage pacts they made—he was fighting for the political survival of Mercia. Not many years after the battle in which he died, England was Christianised—yet the old, dark ‘demon’ of Penda’s England refuses to lie down…Penda’s Fen was written and broadcast during a particularly tumultuous time in British history. At its core, it can be said to be an exploration of the notion of ‘Englishness’. This was partly because of the National Front who formed in 1967 as a reaction against predominately South Asian immigration. By the mid-70s the National Front was the fourth largest political party in the UK and Penda’s Fen is set in Birmingham which was Enoch Powell’s constituency. In fact, Powell gave his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968, at the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham. There has to be an Alan Clarke film in this season. Although it’s a real outlier in terms of his body of work, this was a touchstone when I was developing Enys Men. I’d be lying if I said I fully knew what the film means. As with Robert Bresson’s work, I prioritise feeling over understanding. Besides, even Clarke claimed to not really know what it was about.

In one young man’s search for his sense of self, writer David Rudkin takes us on a magnificently ambiguous metaphysical journey quite unlike any other TV play. The cult status of Penda’s Fen is no doubt due to its potent mix of mysticism, music and landscape which taps into an elemental truth about who we are and our pagan past. But I must without being invidious single out for particular gratitude the producer David Rose who far from being daunted by my first synopsis removed every administrative and financial barrier that might have fallen in its way.’ Penda’s Fen is a very simple story; it tells of a boy, Stephen, who in the last summer of his boyhood has a series of encounters in the landscape near his home which alter his view of the world… This revelation from Stephen crowns Penda’s Fen. It is a final and utter rejection of a cloistered purview and likely an entirely accurate reflection of the typical social ambit of a vicar's son growing up in the Midlands countryside: his world is limited to solitary meditation in his bedroom, the stifling male environment of his school, and lonely bicycle rides in the lonely expanses of the surrounding hills. Moreover, it is an acceptance of Stephen’s emergent homosexuality, that we see glimpses of in his teenage infatuation with his milkman. The more typical adolescent world of drinking and carousing is seen only briefly early in the film—a car full of young revellers pulling over so someone can get out and have a pee—a snapshot of normality that is brutally cut short. However, we never see any of these manifold threads truly tie up. Penda is a film full of interruptions, distractions and incompletions; it demands multiple viewings, as it wanders like the itinerant gaze of Alan Clarke’s camera over the Worcester landscape. It deserves interrogation: Penda is myth, music, ecocriticism, gender and folklore, buried in celluloid. Penda’s Fen was a TV play first screened in March 1974 in the BBC’s Play For Today strand. It was shot entirely on film (many dramas in the 1970s recorded their interiors on video) and runs for about 90 minutes. The writer was David Rudkin and it was directed by Alan Clarke, a director regarded by many (myself included) as one of the great talents to emerge from British television during the 1960s and 70s. The film was commissioned by David Rose, a producer at the BBC’s Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham, as one of a number of regional dramas. Rudkin was, and still is, an acclaimed playwright and screenwriter whose work is marked by recurrent themes which would include the tensions between pagan spirituality and organized religion, and the emergence of unorthodox sexuality. Both these themes are present in Penda’s Fen, and although the sexuality aspect of his work is important—pioneering, even—he’s far from being a one-note proselytiser. Alan Clarke is renowned today for his later television work which included filmed plays such as Scum (banned by the BBC and re-filmed as a feature), Made in Britain (Tim Roth’s debut piece), The Firm (with Gary Oldman), and Elephant whose title and Steadicam technique were swiped by Gus Van Sant. Penda’s Fen was an early piece for Clarke after which his work became (in Rudkin’s words) “fierce and stark”.

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Can’t say how delighted I was that it made 76 in the Time Out list this week! And for a film that’s long been out of circulation! There IS a Penda after all! Stephen begins with certainty over who he is and where he comes from, ‘Oh my country. I say over and over: I am one of your sons, it is true, I am, I am. Yet how shall I show my love?’ He wants to be a part of the institutions of not only England but masculinity, but layer by layer his surety is peeled away. He comes to the realisation that there is no such thing as ‘purity’ or pure Englishness or masculinity, he is man and woman. Through a series of encounters, Stephen learns that his sense of ‘purity’ was naïve. Penda (Geoffrey Staines) anoints Stephen Penda's Fen, with its discussions of Manichean philosophy, dream sequences and the appearance of mythical creatures, seems somehow out of place in Alan Clarke's output. Indeed Clarke himself, who was recruited to direct the play at the behest of Rudkin who saw him as one of the best TV directors in Britain at the time, claimed he never fully understand what the play was about. Nevertheless, the exploration of white English masculinity is a theme common to many of Clarke's dramas. While Stephen is far removed from the aggressive, urban and often working-class (anti) heroes typical of Alan Clarke dramas, he shares their disenfranchisement and their desire to rebel against his surroundings. Below the slopes of the Malvern Hills he has encounters with an angel, and with a demon, with the ghost of Elgar, the crucified Jesus, and with Penda, England's last pagan king. In the final image, he turns away from his idealized landscape, to go into the world and adulthood with a value-system more anarchistic now, and readier to integrate the contradictions of experience.

In 1974, the BBC broadcast the film Penda’s Fen, leaving audiences mystified and spellbound. “Make no mistake. We had a major work of television last night,” The Times declared the next morning. Written by the playwright and classicist David Rudkin, the film follows Stephen, an 18-year-old boy, whose identity, sexuality, and suffocating nationalism unravel through a series of strange visions. After its original broadcast, Penda’s Fen vanished into mythic status, with only a single rebroadcast in 1990 sustaining its cult following. Penda’s Fen has now become totemic for those interested in Britain’s deep history, folklore, and landscape. The earth beneath your feet feels solid there. It is not. Somewhere there the land is hollow. Somewhere beneath, is being constructed, something. We’re not supposed to know.” There were many socio-political changes in the 70s, including a clash between liberals and conservatives as censorship legislation was loosened. TV, film and books were changing what was considered acceptable viewing. Many people weren’t happy with the changes and took it upon themselves to monitor the ‘arts’. Mary Whitehouse was campaigning against the permissiveness of society and founded a group called the Clean up TV Campaign in 1964, and their first meeting was in Birmingham’s Town Hall. Rudkin, who saw himself as a political writer placed himself into the film as the reactionary playwright, Arne (Ian Hog) who lives with his wife (Jennie Heslewood, unfortunately only named ‘Mrs Arne’). At a debate in the local village hall, Arne is answering a question about the strikes which ground Britain to a halt during much of the 70s concluding in the ‘winter of discontent’. Arne is arguing against the assertion that the strikers are holding the country to ransom which was a common refrain at the time. Arne instead tries to divert attention to the government which he sees as secretive and malevolent.Young Stephen, in the last summer of his boyhood, has somehow awakened a buried force in the landscape around him. It is trying to communicate some warning, a peril he is in; some secret knowledge; some choice he must make, some mission for which he is marked down. Matthew Harle is Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Barbican Centre and Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Some still think of Elgar as the archetypal country gentleman whose music enshrines the noblest sentiments of patriotism and faith. That way of looking at him is similar to Stephen’s outlook on the world at the beginning of the film Elgar was, in fact, a tradesman’s son who married above himself and was socially over-sensitive all his life…